Child

In 1944, Mattie Culp, a 26-year-old African American woman, left her own young daughter, Minnie, in her family’s care to work as a live-in maid and caregiver for a white couple and their three-year-old daughter, Judy, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. In Child, Judy Goldman tells the story of her relationship with Mattie.

---

2023 Southern Book Prize Nonfiction Finalist • A 2022 Katie Couric Media Must-Read New Book • A personal meditation on love in the shadow of white privilege and racism

Child is the story of Judy Goldman's relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who worked for her family as a live-in maid and helped raise her—the unconscionable scaffolding on which the relationship was built and the deep love. It is also the story of Mattie's child, who was left behind to be raised by someone else. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it was to be a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South, how a bond can evolve in and out of step with a changing world, and whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves. It is an incandescent book of small moments, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.